                The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,        Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;        And as imagination bodes forth        The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen        Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing        A local habitation and a name.        Such tricks hath strong imagination, . . . ”                    Theseus in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.To think outside the box, you have to know what is in it. This system provides a map of what is inside.Today, in fields ranging from the general use of conceptual diagraming to specific purposes such as prior art searching, competitive environmental scanning, competitive analysis study repository management and reuse, innovation gap analysis identification, novelty checking, technology prediction, investment identification and planning, and product technology comparison and feature planning, users are ever more in need of finding very specific and highly relevant information from a mass of data that is not organized.                        
Known systems for ideation and innovation, developed over centuries, are closed so that the ideas generated are hidden for long periods. While this is somewhat effective in a commercial sense, the attitude fostered and results are often counter-productive for society. Modern concepts of open software and crowd sourcing, coming from the utopian view, also have faults.
Intellectual Property Classification management services may include, for instance, ideation, intellectual property categorization, information asset categorization, product management, product line management, competitive analysis, study management, study outsourcing, development outsourcing, information categorization and retrieval management, contract management, communities, technology advertising, incentives management, collaboration management, and, emergence games involving technology.
Known systems and methods for providing complex conceptual data for searching associatively, along with the connected management of search, retrieval, and categorization services have many disadvantages, however. Present topic maps are of limited use because firm and precise identification of subjects in topic maps works only with a limited set of locators. They cannot easily be kept current or organized. They fail to predict, and they are inefficient. Previous systems have not used capturing of conjuring and only one known project has incorporated the idea of consensus through voting. Previous research efforts have not focused on the business process elements of the problem.
What is needed is an improved categorization, search and retrieval management paradigm combined into a tool that: empowers users to proactively seek a better understanding of the best available knowledge; stirs imagination; provides deep and dynamic prior art classification; addresses the full life cycle of knowledge refinement; and manages the progress of ideas from conception to description to protection to collaboration to securitization and to public release and use for the next great idea. It must bring in knowledge so that a user sees it as already having the knowledge in order for the user to trust it as a search tool. While we extend beyond present inventions, we acknowledge the prior work done in:                Taxonomy, ontology, C-spaces, concept maps, topic maps, Common Mental Map, and intellectual property valuation methods;        Authority maintenance and ontological merging techniques for collective categorization;        Semantic distancing, self-organizing mapping, cluster analysis, cross-citation, crawling and other techniques for automatic categorization operations.        Gap analysis, TRIZ, road mapping, gestation period analysis, Delphi, and ideation/brainstorming techniques.        